Ways To Win Texas Hold Em
Texas Holdem is one of the few games you can play in a casino where you have a legitimate chance to be a long-term winner. Instead of fighting the house edge like when you play blackjack, craps, or roulette, in Texas Holdem, you pay a fee called rake to the house.
This means that all you need to do to show a profit is play better than the other players at the table. And you don’t even need to play better than all of them.
Common Best Way To Win Texas Holdem Poker conditions for no deposit casino bonus offers. Very often a no deposit casino bonus deal is linked to a promotional code reference. Best Way To Win Texas Holdem Poker So, it’s important you enter any promo code into the associated promotions box when you register with your new casino. There can sometimes be a time limit associated with any no. While it’s entirely possible to win from any position on the table, the majority of your Texas holdem winnings will come from late position, while most losses will come from early position. Limit the Number of Hands You Play The single biggest Texas holdem mistake bar none is playing too many hands.
Here’s a list of 7 ways to win more money at Texas Holdem. Each one will help you by itself, but if you can learn to use all of them together, you’ll be well on your way to playing winning Texas Holdem.
Play Poker At The Right Times. Okay, I must admit, this one might seem obvious.
1 – Play Fewer Hands
The biggest leak in most Texas Holdem player’s game is they play too many hands.
Poker can be boring if you have a bad run of starting hands and fold hand after hand. But winning is better than losing and if you need to be bored to win it’s a small price to pay.
Too many poker players are action junkies and feel they have to play every other hand in order to create action. But the best players understand that if they enter the pot with a better hand on average than their opponents that they have a better chance to win.
The only way to know how many hands you play is to track it. Most players don’t have any idea of how many hands they play. So start keeping track of how many hands you play, including from the blinds.
It depends on the limits where you play, but many games have 35 to 40% of the players in each hand.
Most Texas Holdem players lose in the long run. When you combine this knowledge with the fact that most players play 35 to 40% of their hands, you can see why playing fewer hands is a good idea.
Winning Texas Holdem poker players play fewer hands on average than their opponents. This makes their average starting hand better than their opponents. Mathematically, if you start a hand with a better hand than your opponent you’re going to win more often than they win.
It depends on the competition and the limit, but a good number to shoot for is around 20%. In some games, you might need to play 15%, and in some, you might be able to play 25%.
I’ve already mentioned that the place to start is by tracking your play. You need to track how many hands you play, roughly how many your opponents play, and your results.
In most games, your goal should be to play fewer hands than your opponents. You may find yourself in a tight game occasionally where you need to play a few more hands, but these are rare.
Start playing fewer hands and you’ll start seeing an immediate improvement in your results.
2 – Play Against Bad Players
On the surface, this technique seems like common sense, but the truth is that only a small percentage of Texas Holdem players try to locate and play only against bad players.
If you only use one technique on this page, this is the most important one. If you simply play against bad Holdem players, you’ll immediately start winning more.
To illustrate this simple technique in another way, consider two different situations.
In the first situation, you’re playing a game of Texas Holdem against eight people who’ve never played before. They barely know the rules and all play poorly.
In the second situation, you’re playing against the eight best players in the world.
When you’re in the first situation, it’s easy to win. But it’s almost impossible in the second situation.
It might seem simple, but no one looks for the worst players. Most players jump at the first available seat and never think about the competition.
You should also realize that the casino or poker room isn’t the only place to play Texas Holdem. You can recruit players to a private game or look for opportunities to join a private game filled with bad players.
3 – Always Pay Attention
It’s easy to lose focus on the game, especially when you aren’t involved in the hand.
But if you always pay attention, you can learn how your opponents play and see the mistakes they make. You can use this information in future hand to maximize your wins and minimize your losses.
If you can determine which players chase long shot draws and won’t fold on the river you can manipulate situations to be more profitable.
As you track your play as I suggested in the first section, watch your opponents and figure out which one played too many hands. This will help you put them on a range of hands when you’re in a hand against them.
You also have a better chance to catch dealer mistakes and see if anyone is trying to cheat. This is particularly important in private games because there’s always a chance that one or more players are cheating by themselves or working together.
4 – Use Pot Odds
Pot odds are one of the things that sound scary about Texas Holdem. Many players are scared or resistant of math, so they don’t think they can learn how to compute and use pot odds.
But it’s easy to learn about pot odds, and once you do, it helps you figure out which hands to continue with and which hand needs to be folded.
The first thing you need to learn is about odds and how they’re computed and used in Texas Holdem.
The game uses a standard 52 card deck, so it makes it easy to figure out the odds of certain things happening.
Here’s an example:If you have the ace of hearts, king of hearts, jack or hearts, and ten of hearts you know that the deck has only one card, the queen of hearts, which can complete a royal flush. If you’ve only seen the four cards you have the deck has 48 cards in it, and one of them is the queen of hearts.
This means that one out of 48 times from a shuffled deck you’ll get the queen of hearts for your next card.
Of course when you play Texas Holdem you get to see your hole cards and the cards that have been placed on the board in the community cards.
So let’s say your hole cards are the ace and king of hearts and the flop was the jack of hearts, ten of hearts and the six of diamonds. The turn was the two of clubs.
Now you know the value of six cards; your hole cards and the four community cards. This means the chances of the queen of hearts landing on the river are one out of 46 cards. In other words, if you played this exact same situation 46 times, one of those times you’ll get the queen of hearts on average.
This specific example doesn’t come up often in Texas Holdem, but it illustrates how you need to start looking at things when you play.
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To continue with this example, you also know if any of the other three queens hits on the river you’ll have an ace-high straight. And you also know that if one of the other eight hearts lands on the river, you’ll have an ace high flush.
This means that you have 13 cards, the queen of hearts, any other queen, or any other heart, that will give you a winning or strong hand.
Realize that if the six of hearts or two of hearts hits on the river, it completes your flush, but it also pairs the board. Any time the board pairs there’s a chance someone has a full house, which beats your flush.
So now the chances of you improving on the river are 13 out of 46. These are the odds that you’re going to hit a card you need. It also means that 13 cards help you and 33 cards probably don’t.
You might have a small chance to win if the river is an ace, king, jack, or ten, but most of the time this won’t improve your hand enough to win.
You can use the same type of calculation to determine your chances to improve at any point in the hand.
Where this ties into pot odd is when you need to determine whether or not you should call a bet to see the rest of the hand. If the amount you need to call compared to the amount in the pot versus the odds of hitting your hand you should call. If it isn’t you should fold.
This is what pot odds mean.
Here’s an example:Continuing with the previous example, you have 13 cards which you think will win the hand and 33 that probably won’t. The pot has $500 in it and your opponent bets $200. Should you call or fold?
The pot now has $700 in it, and you have to call $200. You need to compare this as a ratio against the ratio of your chances to win.
This is easy to do. Divide the number of cards that don’t help you by the number of cards that do. 33 divided by 13 is 2.54. Then divide the amount in the pot by the amount you need to call. 700 divided by 22 is 3.5.
If the pot ratio is higher than the chance of hitting your hand you should call. If it’s lower, you should fold.
In this case, the pot ration is 3.5, and the ratio of hitting your hand is 2.54, so a call is profitable in the long run.
You can see why this works by running the exact same situation 46 times. To make the call 46 times, your total investment is $9,200. The 33 times you don’t improve your hand you lose your money. But the 13 times that you improve you get back your $200 call and the $700 pot, for a total of $11,700.
$11,700 minus $9,200 is a profit of $2,500.
If you divide this by the 46 times you get an average or expected profit of $54.35 per hand. This means that every time you play this exact situation a call is worth $54.35.
It takes a little while to get used to determining pot odds on the fly, but the good news is you don’t have to determine them exactly to get a good idea of the correct play. You can also memorize common pot odd situations to help you play faster.
Here’s a table with odds for common situations.
Outs and example | On turn | On river | Turn and river combined |
---|---|---|---|
15 outs. Four to a flush and open end straight draw | 2.13 to 1 | 2.07 to 1 | .85 to 1 |
9 outs. Four to a flush draw | 4.22 to 1 | 4.11 to 1 | 1.86 to 1 |
8 outs. Open end straight draw | 4.88 to 1 | 4.75 to 1 | 2.17 to 1 |
4 outs. Inside straight draw | 10.75 to 1 | 10.5 to 1 | 5.06 to 1 |
3 outs. Hitting top pair | 14.67 to 1 | 14.33 to 1 | 7 to 1 |
5 – Use Positive Expectation and Expected Value
In the last section, I discussed pot odds and how to use them. In part of that I showed you how to determine how much a situation was worth per hand, or time you played it.
If you want to be a winning Texas Holdem player you need to find and create as many situations that have a positive expectation or positive expected value and avoid negative expectation situations.
At the heart of this is learning about pot odds, but not every situation at the Holdem table comes down to pot odds. But they all have either a negative or positive expectation.
Expectation starts with your starting hand. The reason you want to play fewer hands is that when you start with a better hand than your opponent you win more often than you lose. This is a positive expectation.
Here’s a list of example hands that have positive expectation:
Your starting hand | Your opponent’s starting hand |
A A | K K |
A Q | A J |
A 10 | K Q |
9 9 | 5 5 |
A K suited | A K |
10 9 | 9 8 |
It’s not always easy to determine if a situation has a positive or negative expectation, but as you gain experience and learn more about your opponents, you get better at figuring it out.
Expectation is a long-term situation, and in the short term, anything can happen. In the example, in the last section you win on average over $54 each time you play, but you still lose 33 out of 46 times.
If you enter the pot with20% of your hands and are playing against an opponent, who enters the pot with 35% of their hands over time you’re going to win more hands against them than they win. But sometimes they’ll still have a better starting hand than you.
6 – Use Your Position
Poor Texas Holdem players ignore their position relative to the dealer button and winning players are always aware of their position.
You should play most of your hands from late position and only your strongest starting hands from early position.
From late position, your opponents are forced to act before you, so you have more information when you have to play. The extra information even if it’s just the fact that they checked is valuable and helps you make better decisions.
When you play weak hands out of position, it costs you money in the long run. In other words, playing weak hands out of position is a negative expectation play.
I mentioned that the most important technique on this page was playing against bad players and using it alone will improve your results. Understanding and using position is the second most important tip on this page, yet it’s ignored by most players.
Don’t make the mistake of ignoring your position. Watch what the losing players do and then don’t do the same thing. They play too many hands, ignore position, and don’t try to play against bad players.
7 – Play Lower Limits
Would you rather win $30 per hour or $10 per hour?
The answer is $30 an hour, yet many decent Texas Holdem players are too proud or stubborn to let themselves win more. They think that just because they can beat a certain limit that they can’t play at a lower limit, even if it means they can win more.
This doesn’t make sense when you read it or think about it, but this is exactly what you do when you don’t consider how much you’re winning at your current limit and compare it to what you can win at a lower limit.
Here’s an example:If you play 20 / 40 limit Texas Holdem and win $10 an hour you’re beating the game. But if you can win $20 an hour playing 10 / 20 you should play 10 / 20.
Track your play and your results and find the most profitable limit for your game. The lower limits usually have worse players, so it’s often more profitable to step down a limit.
Conclusion
Winning Texas Holdem is simple. Play fewer hands, play against bad opponents, use position, use pot odds, and use expectation and you’ll quickly start winning. The 7 ways to win more money at Texas Holdem on this page are all you need to be a winning player
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As a poker beginner, you might be already envisioning the money made when you look down at your cards and see pocket aces. While it is true that AA will win more often than not, you still need to understand you will not win every time. So how often can you expect to win with aces?
Pocket aces win 85% of the time against one opponent holding the random hand in Texas Holdem. Although the percentage varies greatly depending on the opponent’s hand and the number of opponents. 85% is the odds to win when AA goes all-in preflop. Odds change on later streets.
It might feel unfair when we loose holding the best hand but keep in mind if we are not 100% to win, we will lose sometimes.
Chances of winning with pocket aces preflop
Every time you get dealt a hand in Texas Holdem your odds of getting pocket aces are 1/221, which is roughly 0.9%.
First, let’s check how often do pocket aces win preflop. For better representation, I will take a sample of 100 examples. So next 100 times you receive an AA, 15 times you will lose and win 85 times.
How To Win Texas Hold'em Tournaments
We should not forget about variance. If we experience negative variance (if we are unlucky), then we may lose 30 times and win 70 times only. On the other hand, if we get a positive side of variance (if we are lucky), we could win 95 out of 100 times!
Pocket aces odds for winning when all-in preflop change depending on which hand we are up against. See how well does AA against specific hands in terms of poker percentages (chance to win). For new players to poker, let me elaborate on the table below.
- 72o means any combination of 7 and 2, o after means the hand is off-suit (meaning that suits on 7 and 2 don’t match)
- 22+ means any pocket pair of 2 and higher (which is all pocket pairs from 22 to and including AA)
- T+ means any card T and higher (T, J, Q, K, A)
- JTs stands for JT suites, which means that suits of J and T match
- broadway hands are the hands that include any combination of hands where the lowest card is T or higher (TQ, TJ, AA, KK, TT, AT)
The best hand against aces preflop is 76s or 87s. They both win 22.5% of the time, so still a big underdog, but it is the best you can hope for.
How odds change against more players
The odds of winning reduce if more players are involved in the hand. Against two opponents holding random hands, AA wins 73.5% of the time. Against three, the odds of winning are now merely 64%.
The tool I am using to show you the % is called Equilab. And you can download it for free from Pokerstrategy’s website. Click on Poker Tools in the menu, the software and scroll down to the end where it says Free training software. Make sure you download the one for Hold’em (it’s written only Equilab).
Chances of winning with AA on later streets
In poker, there is more than just preflop. We know four streets. Those are preflop, flop, turn, and river. It’s easy to calculate your odds to win preflop. When it comes to postflop, things start to get more complex. There are many possible flops. In fact 22100 possible flops. Now some of those could be grouped, but that would still leave us with 1755 different scenarios of flops. On turn and river, that number only increases.
So I can’t show you the pocket aces win percentage against those. But I encourage you to download yourself Equilab I linked to above and play around with different flops, turns, and rivers. As a general rule of thumb, more players, the more cautious you need to be. It will be more likely at least one player has something good.
Chances of winning pre-flop with other hands
Pocket aces are the strongest hand in poker. But we shouldn’t ignore others. The second strongest hand in Hold’em are pocket kings followed by pocket queens.
Chances to win with pocket kings
From the table, we can notice that equity (% to win) with KK against random hand preflop is a bit different for some cards and pretty much the same for others. The biggest difference comes from broadway hands and 22+. The difference is because 22+ and broadways also include AA and that crushes us (AA is 82% to win against KK).
KK has 78.5% chance to win preflop against a random hand. So if our opponent holds a random hand they will still win roughly 1 out of five times. 21.5% of the time to be exact.
Important note. In scenarios above for AA and KK, where I compared them to random holding, I assumed the opponent has a random hand he is willing to go all-in with preflop. In real poker games, opponents will not be going all-in with random hands.
Lets now check the case for QQ
Same as for KK our equity with QQ now falls lower, when we are up against broadway hands and pocket pairs.
Lastly let’s check how we do against those hands with AK as many players like to overplay AK.
Many beginner players are shocked when they see how poorly AK does. That’swhere seasoned poker players will make a lot of money from beginners. Any experienced player knows newbie often overplays hands that look nice but don’t do that good against stronger holdings. With QQ our equity was a lot higher for all of the scenarios. Even against the worst combination of 72o, AK is supposed to win only 2 out of 3 times. This means you will lose 32 times and win 62 times. And that is if you run just average. And this if there would be no variance involved.
I will go deeper into the strategy in another article as it is a massive topic on its own. For now, know when the opponent goes all-in preflop, he will have a decent hand unless they are aggressive players willing to bluff their stack. While some players play tighter (they don’t play many hands) than others a good rule of thumb is pocket kings and aces are always strong enough to get all the money in the middle preflop. With QQ we should be good against the majority, but the tightest people. When it comes to AK, it depends on the opponent we are up against. Often it comes down to personal playing style. I prefer to play my AK a bit more passively, and I will not be blindly throwing my stack in the middle to gamble for what is around 50% to win against what opponent wants to go with all-in.
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Conclusion
While pocket aces are a definite favorite against any other hand preflop, it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to win. Odds change significantly if more players are involved, but at the end of the day, if we get all the money in preflop, we should be happy. In the worst-case scenario, we will have 77.5% to win. When we have either KK or QQ we should still do good. But with AK we need to start being cautiouspreflop.
Related Links
- Ace King vs Pocket Jacks: Winrate and Examples
- Odds of Winning With Pocket Kings: Including the Winrate